Insider’s newsroom keeps receiving reports from mothers, and fathers too, raising children alone and paying for everything alone — sometimes holding a court ruling the other parent simply ignores. These are the same families who, as the USL (the state health and social services agency) has also pointed out, are left out even of the discount on utility bills.
It’s time for politics to stop taking note and start deciding.
We won’t share the details.
In a small country, a single detail is enough to identify someone, and these people already have enough problems without becoming a headline too. But two stories, blurred just enough, deserve to be told.
There’s a mother earning a factory worker’s wage.
She won in court, more than once. The father of her children is supposed to pay maintenance: he doesn’t pay a single euro.
She covers everything, and has learned something no one told her in the courtroom: children’s shoes grow too small long before a court ruling turns into cash.
There’s a father paying a thousand euros in rent, raising alone a little girl who’s still in school.
The other parent is simply absent.
He’s the one there: mornings at school, then work, evenings doing homework, and at the end of the month, figures that just don’t add up.
This isn’t a battle between mothers and fathers: the reports come from both sides.
It’s something simpler, and harsher.
In these households, one adult is doing the work of two on a single income. And all around, a country where the cost of living rises every year.
The numbers have been laid out by Giovanni Maria Zonzini: between 2015 and 2025, rents in San Marino rose by at least 36%, while average wages grew by just 20%.
For a household with two incomes, that’s already a problem. For those with just one, and children to raise, it’s a subtraction that comes up negative every single month.
And here lies the paradox.
The state does have a tool for this: social tariffs, which cut utility bills for those with a per-capita income under €9,000.
But, as the USL has been pointing out for years, the calculation also factors in tax-exempt income — and among this, child maintenance payments weigh heavily. In other words: the money meant for the children becomes the very reason the children are excluded from the discount.
One wonders what happens, then, to those for whom that maintenance exists only on paper.
There’s talk of co-housing, of studying Emilia-Romagna’s models, of organizing meetings. Fine — ideas are useful.
But rent is due on the first of the month, not at the next conference.
So let’s put it plainly, with three measures that don’t require the housing plan of the century.
First: if maintenance payments don’t arrive, the state should advance the money, then go collect it from whoever isn’t paying.
Germany and France have worked this way for years. It isn’t welfare handout — it’s enforcing court rulings. Someone who doesn’t pay should no longer be facing an ex-partner who might not even afford another lawyer, but the state instead. Which, when it wants to, can be very persuasive.
Second: for those with a job who aren’t paying, maintenance should be automatically deducted from their paycheck, without forcing the other parent to start the battle all over again each time.
Third: the calculation for social tariffs needs reworking, as the USL has long requested. Child maintenance cannot be the reason a single-parent family is deemed too wealthy for a discount on their utility bill. And in housing waiting lists, those raising a child alone should be given priority.
The reports will keep coming, and we will keep collecting them.
Anyone living through this situation can write to us, even anonymously.
But a newspaper can give voice to a problem — it cannot pay someone’s rent.
That, at the end of the month, still falls to them. Alone.
